News: Joe Ely Announces New Book, Reverb: An Odyssey

Texas songwriter Joe Ely has had a jam-packed 2014. He’s gone off and played a good chunk of the country on an acoustic tour, included some Flatlander shows, and recently released the new “old” record, B484, essentially a re-release–or more accurately, a precursor–of his album Hi-Res, which wasn’t ever officially released in the U.S–until now.

You can throw in releasing a new book titled Reverb: An Odyssey slated for a September release on Lettersat3ampress.

As Michael Ventura of Lettersat3ampress states on the back cover:

The young seeker of Joe Ely’s Reverb is the songs of “pioneers who came seeking freedom and found so much of it that they couldn’t handle it.” He lives in Lubbock, Texas, a town that exists “in a normal state of static chaos.” It’s the so-called “Summer of Love,” and many thousands of people his age are being drafted to kill and die in Vietnam while many thousands protest, get high, make music, and make fairly certain that, for better or worse, the world will never be the same.

I know no novel that captures the underside of that summer with the immediacy of Joe Ely’s Reverb.

In addition, Ely, along with Joel Guzman, will be playing The Cactus Theater this Friday, August 15. You can purchase presale tickets here.

Also, listen to the excellent interview on Texas Public Radio conducted by Nathan Cone with Joe Ely on B484 as well as just general Ely things below.